Ministry of Moral Panic

by Amanda Lee Koe

  As I write this, I am thinking of how to best upset Adeline, my so-called birth mother. She has taken me from Ibu, with the full weight of the Netherlands behind her. The truth is that she gave me up to Ibu when I was six, along with an old sewing machine. What she is saying now is that she only meant to put me in Ibu’s care for three days, and that she didn’t manage to fetch me back because she was interred by the Japanese. I do not believe her for a minute.

  I write this diary in solidarity with the likes of Anne Frank, whom Sister Ana told me about. One day I will die, having suffered, and someone shall find my words worthwhile. Like Anne, I live in an attic, shrouded in a certain type of secrecy, though I sleep between my two sisters. They are afraid I will attempt to run away. You must forgive me the indulgent alignments with great women of beauty or composure long gone.

  Alone here I find myself yearning for an abstracted comfort—certainly not from the bosom of Adeline, who mostly thinks to pick on me, who makes me perform the chores of the entire household. Though she sometimes furnishes me with rice for my meals—the grainy bread and potatoes they have for three meals are so disagreeable—she has already wrought onto me violence, and I shall never forgive her.

  3rd April 1951

  Allahu Akbar.

  Allah, I beg your forgiveness.

  I know you’ve long seen the photograph they took of me, the one headlined Bertha knelt before Virgin Mary statue, and also the one on the front page of the Singapore Standard, where I held hands with the Reverend Mother. To tell the truth, it was the Reverend Mother who took my hands in hers. I merely thought it rude to pull away. I was laughing in the photograph by the piano, because the nuns had made jokes with me right before the photograph was taken. They might as well have held me down and tickled me. Understand, the nuns were kind, but I knew my allegiance even amidst this kindness. They were gentle as they took away my baju kurung and gave me a Western dress. They brushed my hair and put a big maroon bow in my hair: There, there. How pretty you look now, Bertha!

  But Allah, I answer only to your name.

  I still make ablution here. In secret, you understand. I have in the cramped attic I share with my sisters a saucer that they believe is for the cat, but when it is quiet I perform wudhu, wetting hands, mouth, nose, arms, face, running my damp hands through my hair.

  Each day I make the same prayer: I pray that those who died because of me and the hundreds who were injured might forgive me, be they Malay, Chinese, Indian, European or Eurasian. Will you widen your embrace to bring your grace to these souls?

  I remember the ways of prayer Ibu taught me. I found on a world map Saudi Arabia, where Mecca is. The Netherlands is atop it and leftward, so in my room I kneel to the diagonal right to face the Ka’ba.

  Allah, I pray you will keep Ibu and Mansoor safe and warm, that we may be reunited soon.

  17th May 1951

  Today I said to Adeline, It is obvious you do not love me. That was why you handed me to someone else. Why did you come and take me back?

  Adeline said, At that time, I did not have the means to take care of all the children.

  I said, if you could feed six children, surely it was possible that you could take care of seven. Besides, I do not eat that much.

  Here, Adrianus struck me. He said: You ungrateful child. The exact words of the Dutch Commissioner upon my arrival at the Schiphol airport on 15th December last year, when he extended his hand in greeting right before the press conference and I refused to shake it. Why would I?

  The thousands of people shouting my name in the subzero winter on the tarmac. Yet more people upon our arrival at Bergen-Op-Zoom. The car had to stop half a kilometre away from the house because of the people crowded around. Someone said they’d been camping here since dawn, for my arrival, could they touch my face? They reached out their hands, and when I recoiled, they flinched. How incredible it is, to mistake your selfishness as someone else’s happiness.

  2nd December 1951

  Whilst doing the laundry today, my hands bled. I had been wondering when they would. Being unable to feel them any more, pain is barely a good indication, what with the blisters.

  The water has turned to ice and still I am made to rinse the clothes by hand—the clothes of the entire family: Adeline, Adrianus, Wiesje, Corry, Kees, Benny, Carol and Ria. How I should like to rip up Adrianus’s workpants or Ria’s apron.

  As the skin of my wet hands shrunk up, I thought of Adeline’s claim to the court in Singapore that Ibu was a babu who had kidnapped me and taken me to the jungle. The jungle! Ibu’s houses in Bandung and Malaya were finer than this one in Bergen-Op-Zoom. In Bandung, we had a maid and a gardener. Here I am, a babu indeed, mopping all the floors and making all the beds.

  My Ibu was many things, but not a babu. A Japanese language teacher and a jeweller, for example. She would give me jewellery of the latest fashions and I would play like I was Mata Hari. I was the envy of all the children of the village. Later, Adeline took away all the jewellery Ibu had given to me. The small freshwater pearl earrings I wore are now on her earlobes.

  29th March 1952

  I am already fifteen but I go to grade school in the poor company of girls five years younger at St Gerardus Majella, because I have only recently been schooled in Dutch. They are quick, as girls are, to stick together and to play petty games and to call outsiders names.

  They call me reus, which means giant. It does not bother me awfully—I have always been called names, they called me orang puteh, orang puteh, for my fair complexion back then—but I am sad that I have no one to speak with in Malay, here. I fear the words are slipping away from me, and so it gives me great comfort to be penning these words, in this diary, in the tongue of my Malayan motherland.

  We are forbidden to speak Malay at home, although all of us but Ria, who was born in the Netherlands, know it, having lived in Malaya. In a fit of anger last week I’d said to Corry—Aku hati jahat. Adeline was beside herself and told me to mop the floors, knowing I’d already done it. Adeline is herself Eurasian—her mother, my grandmother, Nor Louise, was a bangsawan actress. Uncle Soewaldi, her brother, was Muslim, and married an Indonesian woman—though Adeline lied about this in court.

  She’d placed her hand on the Bible, the book she so reveres, and swore to the judge and the courtroom that she would tell the truth, the whole truth, and only the truth. Now she makes me sit by her knee as she reads Psalms.

  15th December 1953

  Ibu, the last thing I heard you say to me, that I said back to you, word for word, was this:

  I would rather kill myself than be separated from you.

  Then you fainted dead away, and they took me with them in the car.

  It has been three years now, and we are both still alive.

  We disappoint each other.

  27th April 1956

  Only a week into this marriage and I begin to wonder if this was a poor choice—choosing a husband to lose a mother. Surely no one else thinks this way? I wake in the morning to the way Gerard’s mouth trembles when he snores, how he hugs his hands to his chest and it makes me feel dull and clumsy—a bad start to the day. At least at Adeline’s I had my own bed to myself: I only had to put up with her wheedling in the day, and I could easily pack a lunch and eat it by the canal.

  I read today of the bones of an ancient anchoress found in the Getrudiskerk. The anchoress was sealed in a space between the church’s walls to anchor the church from evil. Before she was sealed into the cell, a ritual was performed on her, not unlike the Last Rites. All she had with her was a Bible, a chamber pot and a brick-sized hole that opened up to street-level. The faithful would leave her food scraps and drinks of water, and help to clear her slops. If their faith waned or if they were merely forgetful, the anchoress would easily suffer—or die from—thirst and starvation.

  Would that I could be such a woman, if only to get away. From mothers; from men. From childbearing; from caprice.

  15th February 1957

 
; The birth of a fat baby boy, mine. Adeline is very happy. I saw her standing red-faced with excitement through the course of my labour, as if it were the veritable beginning of her deliverance. As if through my own motherhood she would be cleansed—that I would now finally understand what she’d meant every time she said she did it for my own good. That it would become the truth.

  We have named him Frans.

  2nd July 1967

  Frans, Marlies, Theo, Huub, Carolien, Paul, Maryolien, Hans, Peter, Silvija.

  Every year a baby, as if by clockwork. I am constantly pregnant. I am more pregnant than not pregnant in a year every year for the past ten years, and I realise this to be, perhaps, the true destiny of a married woman of my times. Which is not unlike, say, that of a sow.

  18th January 1976

  A young woman came to Het Pumpke today. She had cropped hair and she wore jeans. She walked straight up to me—I had my hands full of crockery from tidying a table—and introduced herself as a graduate student of feminist and post-colonial theory at Erasmus up in Rotterdam. Gerard eyed her carefully. She said she was writing a paper on me as a pawn of symbolism for the last vestiges of the perception of pride for a vacating colonial power. I remember this clearly enough to write it down word for word because I asked her to repeat this three times—there were so many big words and she said them in a single breath each time. She said it as if I were supposed to be honoured, but I could forgive her yet, because she was not working for the media, and because her eyes were bright with that youthful determination.

  What does that have to do with me, I asked, and she thought I was dull, that I had not kept up and she would have to re-explain herself.

  You are my thesis, she kept saying.

  I understand, I said again. But what does your thesis have to do with me?

  This time I think she understood. She sat down and ordered up some stamppot. I continued busying myself with the cafeteria. She looked out the window and smoked some cigarettes. The way she put out her cigarettes was decisive and harsh, the way a man would.

  Finally at closing time she approached me and said: Your life was not your own.

  I was not expecting this. Yes, I said and then I cried. I lifted my apron to wipe my face, and she tried to embrace me.

  Please, I said, please leave me alone. She hesitated, then walked out, leaving a tip on the counter. It was a big tip—twenty guilders. I saved it up to pay for my Maryolien’s treatment for pneumonia.

  31st, January 1987

  They say this resort was once owned by Frank Sinatra, that Marilyn Monroe spent a winter vacation here in Lake Tahoe. It’s thoughts like these I try to hold onto when I am fishing used condoms out of WCs, even if I’m in the small motel across the boulevard, where Marilyn would never be. To make ends meet, I work in seven chalets and motels. I don’t give myself rest days. What is that line? An idle mind is the devil’s playground?

  One of the first few English words I learned was chambermaid. Also, the land of the free—something that Ben said to me, over and over, like a charm—and prostitution. It surprised me that prostitution was not legal in the rest of the forty-nine states of the land of the free—only in regulated brothels in Nevada. Back in the Netherlands we have no hang-ups such as these, as long as they are consenting adults.

  Whenever I think of this term—consenting adults—I think of Mansoor. How amusing it is that we were parted because I was—by the British Constitution—only a child. One year shy of my fourteenth birthday—the lawful age for a Muslim marriage, three years shy of being sixteen, the legal matrimonial age in England. Amusing because if what they feared was the untoward behaviour of a husband nine years my senior, they were guided by their own poor moral standards, not Mansoor’s. It was Mansoor who suggested to Ibu we should have a nikah gantung, because I was young and he was still a trainee teacher. He said we would consummate our marriage when I was twenty-one. He would have been thirty then. He would have waited for my maidenhead for eight years.

  Three divorces later, never again have I experienced such gentility in a man. What they want right off the bat is the old in-out. The sooner the better. To think that the word that went around was that my Muslim husband was a savage, whom I needed protection from, when he was in fact descended from a family of nobility, just like Ibu, and more educated than any other man I have been with since. De Telegraaf published our wedding photograph and called me The Child Bride. Mansoor wore his round spectacles that, to me, gave him his scholarly air, and his songkok, grinning broadly for the camera. A girl from my school told me once: I saw your wedding photograph the year before you returned. My father showed it to me and my sisters. Everyone was very angry that you were marrying a monkey.

  My Malay husband was the finest man I ever met, I retorted, and she couldn’t tell if I was joking. We were only fifteen then, and had had limited contact with men—but it has been true—I mean it till this day: Mansoor is the finest man I have ever met.

  23 March 1988

  In the chalets and motels of Lake Tahoe, at any time of the day, couples are always being intimate with one another. I work both the morning and night shift. In the cheaper motels where the walls are thinner, I hear them loud and clear as the foghorn signals in the harbour.

  Whenever I hear these sounds, I think of Mansoor, and once in a while I even feel a faint shudder on my forearm or between my thick thighs—like muscle memory, except we never touched. Sometimes—through the years—when I had conjugal relations with Gerard, or Tom, or Ben, I would close my eyes and pretend they were Mansoor.

  The North Shore of Nevada is a land of sin. At first I could not understand why anyone would want to come here, despite its great beauty, situated in nature. The skiing and the hiking yes, but then these casinos with their plush carpets, the croupiers with their slicked-back hair, the illegal prostitutes waiting on street corners—some very beautiful, others as old and fat as I now am.

  What would Mansoor think of me? I remember reading the Qur’an with him, his harmonic monotone as he intoned the holy scriptures. He could Khatm by heart, without looking at the Qur’an. I only completed Khatm twice, whilst looking at the Qur’an.

  When they took me back to Bergen-Op-Zoom, for the first month I tried so hard to Khatm from memory, because Ibu said whoever completes a Khatm has an accepted prayer: if Allah wishes, He gives his reward to him right in this world or He leaves it to the afterworld by bestowing him a tree in Heaven.

  But I could never remember even the first five verses of the Surah Al-Baqara.

  All I remembered were inconsequential snatches I’d found beautifully strange:

  And when the she-camels, ten-months pregnant, are abandoned—

  Surely, man is in a state of loss—

  The evil of those who blow into knots to undo them—

  Sneaking whisperer into the hearts of men—

  11th June 1989

  I will burn in two hells.

  At my funeral, however I die and whenever, I would like for little statues of the Buddha to be given out at my memorial. I have already purchased these little statues, made of bronze-plated aluminium, wrapped them in old newspapers, and packed them away at the back of my wardrobe. I wish to be cremated, lest my body be fought over in death.

  On my third day as a chambermaid two years ago, I opened the bedside drawer in a resort to stow away the pay-per-view TV menu, and there I saw them, side-by-side: the Bible, the Qur’an and a laminated book with a picture of a stone Buddha on it. I was first paralysed, then I slammed the drawer shut on my finger.

  I scrubbed the toilet and changed the sheets, then I reopened the drawer and took out the third book. It read Lotus Sutra on the front and I flipped it open:

  You, the richest person in the World. Have been labouring and struggling endlessly. Not knowing that you already possess all that you seek.

  After that, I sometimes opened the bedside drawers in the resorts—they don’t have them in the motels—to peer at the Bible and the Qur’an
lying next to one another, closed, like infants in a cot. I later found out from other Buddhist texts in the drawers that there is no singular holy book Buddhism is based upon, nor is there a creed or a one-God concept. I started reading all the Buddhist texts I found, but I would never open the Bible or the Qur’an.

  Today, on a whim—though I no longer believe in Jesus or Allah—I opened the Bible with hands that trembled. This is the verse it fell upon:

  Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

  And then I opened the Qur’an:

  And thou seest the mountain which thou thinkest to be firmly fixed, but they shall pass away like the passing of the clouds—the work of Allah Who has made everything perfect. Verily, He knows full well what you do.

  I peeled back the curtains and threw open the windows, looking out at the lake and the mountains, breathing in the bitingly fresh air.

  Chick

  YOU ONCE HELD a fluffy yellow chick in the ball of your hand when you were nine, cupping your palm around it gingerly. This was on an excursion to the zoo, and the tram had alighted at the farm animals section. It stank of goat shit and hay, and there were potbellied black pigs in a pen that you could have stared at all afternoon, disgusted by and enamoured of their sorry anatomy.